Whitney Farmer has four words by the singer-songwriter Noah Kahan tattooed on her leg: "Give yourself a reason." It's a line from "Call Your Mom," a harrowing ballad addressed to someone who appears on the verge of self-harm -- possibly suicide.
When Farmer, 32, first heard the track, she was going to therapy twice a week, "trying to fix my brain." "Nothing was working," she said. Kahan's song provided a badly needed jolt, helping her to realize that "you don't need to end your life."
"I look at that tattoo," she added, "and remember that life is very important."
A growing legion of fans have this sort of visceral connection with Kahan's plaintive folk-pop. His single "Stick Season" has more than 1.7 billion streams on Spotify. He will release a new album, "The Great Divide," on April 24, less than two weeks after Netflix put out a documentary that shows him vaulting from clubs to arenas to ballparks. His summer stadium tour is already sold out -- more than 1 million tickets in total across 30 concerts.
"With Noah, you're not dealing with a carefully constructed persona or character," said Ryan Langlois, the singer's operations manager. "He's working in the other direction to be as open as he can, which is what makes it feel so personal to the fans."
Kahan, 29, is not the only star who communicates this way; Billie Eilish, for example, has talked about her history with depression and self-harm. But that transparency is "missing for a lot of guys in the industry," said Hannah Daniel, 26, who helps run a fanpage for Kahan on Instagram. "A lot of people think it's embarrassing or taboo to talk about mental health."
The singer's following ballooned during the pandemic, which forced him to return home to Vermont from New York City. While some people were driven crazy by spending hours in proximity to family, Kahan was creatively rejuvenated.
Before that, "I didn't know what my own voice was," he said in the documentary "Noah Kahan: Out of Body." "I think I was close to giving up music, or at least giving up hope."
Despite the solemn themes of his songs, Kahan avoids self-seriousness by regularly poking fun at his own lyrics, partially camouflaging anguished music behind comedic patter. "My goal is to leave you a little more depressed than you came in tonight," he told a crowd in 2024.
One of the tracks Kahan released during the pandemic was "Stick Season," which became his breakout. A driving acoustic hit about the aftermath of a breakup, it's flecked with banjo and full of gimlet-eyed self-interrogation: "I thought that if I piled somethin' good on all my bad/That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad."
"A happy sounding song about something sad almost makes the feelings easier to process," Daniel said. "He has a very clever way of writing that can make something heavy feel lighter." Kahan, who has his own tattoos, wrote out some of his lyrics by hand and posted shots on Twitter for fans who wanted to plan their ink.
When artists began to play shows again, his tours scaled rapidly. In the fall of 2022, he was selling around 1,500 tickets a night, according to Billboard. By July 2024, Kahan filled Boston’s Fenway Park. That year, the “Stick Season” album quietly outsold releases from household names, including Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” and Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine.”
Much of Kahan’s upswing was caught on camera. He is the third prominent act this year to have a Netflix project come out around the same time as a new album, following Harry Styles, who accompanied his latest release with a concert film, and BTS, who had a documentary and livestreamed a concert.
"Artists are coming to us more and more because we are a global service," said Jeff Gaspin, vice president of unscripted series at Netflix. "There are not many opportunities to launch a new album globally."
Although "Noah Kahan: Out of Body" hits typical music documentary beats -- footage from recording sessions, triumphant performances -- it makes room for weightier topics as well: The singer's struggles with body image and the guilt he feels for airing unflattering family details in songs that are now shouted back at him in shows.
"There's some pretty agonizing stuff that we see," said Nick Sweeney, the film's director.
Kahan launched the Busyhead Project, a nonprofit devoted to destigmatizing mental health issues, in 2023, and his recent on-screen candor has only endeared him further to his fans. Some posted teary-eyed reaction videos on TikTok after they watched his documentary. "Letting everyone know that it's OK to not be OK is so important," Farmer said.
Throughout "Noah Kahan: Out of Body," the singer also frets over whether he can maintain his momentum. At one point in the film, he catastrophizes in real time, imagining a scenario in which he plays a lackluster show and then everything goes downhill: "People start losing interest, and the fans start to think it's boring, stale, and the label loses faith."
Transformed and sometimes tattooed with his lyrics, Kahan's followers do not share these concerns. "That is his worry," said Haley May, 28, another custodian of the singer's fanpage. "I know what he does next is going to be good no matter what."